Kindle Fire

The top item bought on Amazon.com, and one of the most popular
items this year is the Kindle Fire, a seven-inch color screen
tablet. With it, one can play movies, games, music, and read books
and magazines all from the palm of their hand. But is it really
worth the $200 price tag?

I am an Apply guy. The intuitiveness of the iPad and iPhone
along with the seamless responsiveness of Apple's products was
obviously on my mind as I took a closer look at the Fire.

My first thoughts were that I didn't like the Fire. Who is
Amazon kidding? It didn't even come close to the iPad with looks,
interface and intuitiveness. But then, I looked at it more.

At first, the Fire seemed to be a little heavy with a small
screen, but after using it a little more, I was pleasantly
surprised with the size of the tablet. It was more portable than I
had originally thought.

The Fire's physical design is solid. It doesn't feel cheap, or
that it might break if I dropped it off the coffee table. I didn't
try and break mine - so I don't know if it will break or not, you
are on your own for that test.

The Fire connects to Amazon's cloud service via Wi-Fi, and you
can sync your device through Wi-Fi or through a mini-USB cord. You
also charge the device through the same port.

The fact that you had to be on a Wi-Fi network to do anything on
it was a little bothering. I am used to being able to use a 3G
network to get my content on the go. With the Fire, you will need
to load what you can onto it prior to road trips, unless you have a
cellphone that you can turn into a Wi-Fi hotspot. With 8GB of
storage on the Fire, Amazon doesn't expect its users to do much of
that. Their cloud service is included, and you have unlimited
space, as long as your movies, shows and music are all purchased on
Amazon.com. With that, you need to have Wi-Fi access to listen,
read or watch the stuff you have on your cloud.

When you are on a Wi-Fi network, the movie and television
streaming is seamless. The picture quality is really good, even on
slow internet connections.

One aspect of the physical design that I didn't like was the
location of the power button. Unless you have a case for your Fire
that puts a buffer between the palm of your hand and the button
when holding the Fire in landscape mode, you will most likely
accidentally bump it and turn the device off. Also, coming from
using Apple products, I wished for a physical home button and
physical volume buttons.

While using the Fire, you have to access the volume through a
tab system which seemed to be cumbersome, and even more so when the
Fire wasn't open and on.

The interface on the Fire was missing something. It simply
seemed choppy to me. When you go to your Books tab and then want to
go to your Newsstand tab, you have to press the Back button or the
home button, and then press the respective button.

If Amazon integrates a multi-tasking aspect into the operating
system or a frames-type tab menu, this would rectify this
issue.

The battery life on the Fire is awesome. I never felt that I
needed to recharge it, or to check what the power level was at. The
specifics say the Fire has eight hours of continuous reading or
seven and a half hours of video playback, with wireless off. It
fully charges in about four hours.

The Fire has an accelerometer, so you will be able to play some
of the games where you turn the tablet for steering. This is also
used to automatically to rotate your books and movies depending on
which way you are holding the Fire.

One aspect that really stood out as plus for the Fire is that
you can look at websites with Flash. Unlike the iPad, which unless
you hack (called jailbreaking) your iPad, you can't look at
Flash-based websites. With the Fire you can. I was pleasantly
surprised and really felt this was a very strong point for the
Fire.

The price also stood out to me. For $200, this is a fantastic
device. I would expect to see something like the Fire for
$350-$400. With iPads starting at $500, and going up to $829, this
is a steal.

If you want a tablet that can stream movies and read books on a
larger screen than a Touch but don't need the hundreds of thousands
of apps on the Apple network, the Fire is wonderful. If you like
apps that Apple has and the interface that Apple has built around
its products, you should probably stick within Apple.

Currently, Amazon has more than 10,000 apps for the Fire,
including mail client apps, journals, family planners, financial
advisory apps, and of course, Angry Birds.

If you have $200, and would like a nice solid tablet, but don't
need too many extras, go for the Kindle Fire.

2 comments:

Amazons app store is also very lame. Its even bad compared to Googles own Android Market. Plus they force you to use only Amazon, which makes it all the worse. They keep breaking any Kindle Jailbreak that is put out. Eventually peope will grow tired of this and give up on it, or return their Kindles.

I'm pretty sure you can't view flash on a iPad even if its jailbroken. Flash also has been discontinued by Adobe for ALL portable devices. Plus its not that big a deal either not having it, in fact its a huge benefit... as you don't get the stupid websites that are full of flash bogging your tablet down and draining its battery.

There are tons of apps for websites with videos that you can use. The iPad is FAR superior to the Kindle.